GLOBAL WARMING AND THE AFTER EFFECTS FOR BANGLADESH.

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China leads the world in solar power installations
Lower taxes for solar power continues to drive market expansion globally, report says
By Lucas Mearian
Senior Writer, Computerworld | Dec 6, 2016 2:22 PM PT

China continues to lead the world in solar-power installations and is expected to increase its capacity by more than 7 gigawatts (GW), or 7 billion watts, over last year, according to a new report.

Last year, China installed 15.13GW of new solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity, reaching a cumulative solar capacity of 43.48GW, according to research firm GlobalData.

This year, China's cumulative capacity has already surpassed 50.3GW. The country's PV installed capacity has increased around 15-fold since 2011 when it had 3.30GW of installed solar capacity.

In the first quarter of 2016, China added a total of 7.14GW of solar capacity, of which 6.17GW accounted for solar PV power plants, and 970 megawatts (MW) for distributed PV installations, such as rooftop panels.


13th Five Year Plan (FYP) sets a 2020 solar PV target at 150GW to 200GW, and aims to shift focus from grid-scale expansion toward quality and efficiency. The FYP also intends to attain a non-fossil fuel renewable energy consumption of around 15% by 2020 and 20% by 2030, Mathur said in an email reply to Computerworld.

Solar soars globally
This year, worldwide solar installed capacity is expected to increase by 70GW to 294.69GW, according GlobalData's report.

Behind China, the world's largest market for annual solar photovoltaic installations is Japan and the U.S. The U.S. is expected to finish out 2016 with 40.61GW of cumulative solar capacity, a 58.7% increase over 2015 and a whopping 915% increase since 2011. Japan will have 42.41GW of installed capacity, a 23% increase over last year and 763% increase since 2011.

Planned utility-scale solar additions in the U.S. this year are expected to top 9.5GW, the most of any single energy source, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Last year, the U.S. added less than one-third of that, or 3.1GW of solar capacity, the EIA's data indicated.

The top five states where solar capacity is being added are California (3.9GW), North Carolina (1.1 GW), Nevada (0.9 GW), Texas (0.7 GW), and Georgia (0.7 GW).

In 2015, nearly 2GW of distributed solar photovoltaic capacity (such as rooftop solar) was added in the U.S., the EIA stated.

Across the globe, there is strong demand for solar power. In the first half of 2016, there was a rush to install solar globally as new projects reaped the benefits from higher 2015 solar feed-in tariffs (FiTs), according to GlobalData.

FiTs are long-term renewable energy contracts that guarantee a lower cost for energy compared to purchasing power produced by more traditional methods, such as coal-fired power plants.

"In China, the National Development and Reform Commission has set a benchmark on the on-grid solar PV power tariff [reductions]," Mathur said, which has seen rates decrease dramatically over 2015.

In India, solar power tariff rates decreased to a record low of INR4.34 ($0.064) per kilowatt hour (kWh). Solar panel efficiency, together with lower silicon costs, is decreasing the system cost, and the capacity utilization factor in solar PV has been increasing, according to Mathur.

"The country's solar PV sector is benefiting from growing policy and political support," he said.

Italy is expected to take fifth place in 2016 with a cumulative installed solar PV capacity of 19.16 GW. The country's annual solar PV installations will experience low installation rates compared to previous years due to a subsidy cut, Mathur said.

"The Italian PV market is expected to survive even with no subsidies for its new solar PV installations, driven by small-scale installations of less than 200KW for which the government offers a net metering scheme," Mathur said.

Net metering is the ability for homeowners and businesses to sell surplus power generated from solar panels back to utilities.
http://www.computerworld.com/articl...s-the-world-in-solar-power-installations.html

 

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Latin America is set to become a leader in alternative energy
The power of the Andean sun
Dec 10th 2016

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BESIDE the Pan-American Highway, almost 600km (375 miles) north of Santiago, Chile’s capital, lies El Romero, the largest solar-energy plant in Latin America and among the dozen biggest in the world. Its 775,000 grey solar panels spread out across the undulating plateau of the Atacama desert as if they were sheets of water. Built at a cost of $343m by Acciona Energía, a Spanish company, last month El Romero started to be hooked up to the national grid. By April it should reach full strength, generating 196MW of electricity—enough to power a city of a million people. A third of its output will be bought directly by Google’s Chilean subsidiary, and the rest fed into the grid.

El Romero is evidence of an energy revolution that is spreading across Latin America. The region already leads the world in clean energy. For almost seven months this year, Costa Rica ran purely on renewable power. Uruguay has come close to that, too. In 2014, the latest year for which comparable data exist, Latin America as a whole produced 53% of its electricity from renewable sources, compared with a world average of 22%, according to the International Energy Agency.
http://www.economist.com/news/ameri...t-call-second-referendum-comes-cost-colombias
The region’s impressive clean-energy production is boosted by an abundance of hydropower. Big dams are increasingly controversial: in recent years, Brazil and Chile have blocked hydro-electric projects in environmentally sensitive areas. Alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal, still only account for around 2% of Latin America’s output, compared with a world average of 6%. Nonetheless, there are several reasons to think this share will grow quickly.

One is the region’s natural endowment. El Romero, for example, enjoys 320 days of sunshine a year. On the horizon, amid the Andean mountaintops, sit two astronomical observatories, testament to the clarity of the air. Much of Latin America is well suited to solar and wind power; volcanic Central America and the Caribbean have geothermal potential.

Worldwide, technological progress and economies of scale have slashed the cost of green energy. Once built, solar plants are much cheaper than thermal power stations to operate. “El Romero is a symbol that alternative energy is no longer alternative. It’s the most commercial now,” says José Ignacio Escobar, Acciona Energía’s boss in Chile.

Countries such as Chile, Brazil, Mexico and recently Argentina have tweaked their regulations to encourage alternative energy without having to offer subsidies. Some have held auctions for generation contracts purely for renewables, points out Lisa Viscidi, an energy specialist at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington. Chile’s regulatory framework is trusted by investors; it has encouraged renewable generation by auctioning smaller contracts. It has set a target of producing 20% of its electricity from non-hydro renewable sources by 2025. Argentina and Mexico have similar goals.

There are two pitfalls. In Chile, the penalty for failing to fulfil contracts is low, which means the winners of auctions may pull out later if they do not raise financing. Moreover, both solar and wind power are intermittent. That means they need to be paired with baseload generation. In many Latin American countries this tends to come from natural gas, which emits less carbon than oil, though in Chile it is coal. Greater efforts to connect grids between countries might reduce the need for fossil fuels as a backup.

Renewable energy offers big benefits to the region. Chile is short of domestic fossil fuels. As a result of its latest auction of energy contracts, by 2025 prices should be a third lower than they are now, reckons Andrés Velasco, a former finance minister. By promoting renewables, Latin America is helping to curb carbon emissions globally—though it also needs to do more to stop deforestation and encourage public transport.

That matters for political as well as altruistic reasons. Latin Americans worry more than anybody else about climate change, according to polling by the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. They have good reason. The region is prone to natural disasters and extreme weather. To take one current example, Bolivia last month imposed water rationing in La Paz, the capital. The three reservoirs that serve the city are almost dry. Lake Poopó, once a large freshwater body in the altiplano, has all but dried up, seemingly permanently.

Outside Chile and Colombia, coal deposits are scarce in Latin America. That is one reason why industrialisation came late to the region. In the 21st century, it may turn out to be an advantage in helping Latin America move swiftly to a post-carbon economy.

http://www.economist.com/news/ameri...n/nwl/n/n/n/8320151/email&etear=dailydispatch

 

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ENVIRONMENT
Dirty power: Sweden wants your garbage for energy
Trash is a fast-growing import in the Scandinavian country, which turns it into heat for people’s homes
March 27, 2015 5:00AM ET
by Elisabeth Braw @elisabethbraw
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/27/sweden-wants-your-garbage-for-energy.html

A garbage dump in Göteborg, Sweden.
Martin Almqvist / Johnér Images / Corbis
Every day, some 300 trucks arrive at a plant outside the city of Göteborg on the west coast of Sweden. They carry garbage, but they are not there to dump the cargo. Instead, they deliver it to the plant’s special ovens, which burn it, providing heat to thousands of local homes.

“The only fuel we use is waste,” says Christian Löwhagen, a spokesman for Renova, the local government-owned energy company operating the plant. “It provides one-third of heat for households in this region.” Across Sweden, 950,000 homes are heated by trash; this lowly resource also provides electricity for 260,000 homes across the country, according to statistics from Avfall Sverige, Sweden’s national waste-management association.

With Swedes recycling almost half (47 percent) of their waste and using 52 percent to generate heat, less than 1 percent of garbage now ends up in the dump. “Sweden has the world’s best network of district heating plants” — essentially large ovens that use a variety of fuels to generate heat, which is then transported to consumers’ homes through a network of underground pipes — “and they’re well-suited for use of garbage,” says Adis Dzebo, an energy expert at the Stockholm Environment Institute. “By contrast, in many other countries the heat and electricity infrastructure is based on gas or other fossil fuels, so it’s not economical to start building plants that utilize garbage.”

Here’s the problem: Swedes (as well as Germans, Danes, the Dutch and Belgians) have become so good at recycling that there’s no longer enough garbage to meet the heating plants’ needs. Sweden now has to import the trash that most other countries are trying to dispose of — some 800,000 tons in 2014, up from 550,000 tons in 2010, according to Avfall Sverige.

Last year Renova brought in 100,000 tons of foreign garbage, mostly from Britain, in addition to the 435,000 tons supplied by Swedish municipalities. In Stockholm, energy provider Fortum also imports garbage, and in the southern city of Malmö, the Sysav energy company brought in 135,000 tons of waste from Norway and Britain last year, according to the company’s communications director, Gunilla Carlsson. That’s an almost 100 percent leap from the year before.

“We try to stay up to date on where well-sorted garbage is available,” says Löwhagen. “We only use waste where all recyclable bits have been taken out. In Europe, enormous amounts of garbage are put in landfill, so we’re doing other countries a favor by taking care of it for them.” In order to minimize cost and environmental impact, companies try to get a cheap ride for their garbage on ships going to Sweden that would otherwise have empty holds.

You wouldn’t believe how many emails we get every week from people offering us garbage.
Weine Wiqvist

CEO of Sweden’s waste-management association

It’s not that Swedish decision-makers foresaw the need to safely dispose of garbage when they started building a countrywide network of district heating plants a generation ago, but it turned out to be a fortuitous move when public concern over trash in landfills prompted the country to rethink its garbage-disposal policies. Today putting waste on the trash heap is banned, which means that municipalities have to sort, recycle and, yes, burn, their residents’ garbage. As a result, waste now constitutes 19 percent of the fuel used by district-heating plants, which heat half of Sweden’s households and also use biomass such as leftover tree branches from the logging industry. That makes Sweden the world leader in energy generated from garbage; it is followed by, in order, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

Using garbage for energy neatly solves the issue of excessive reliance on landfills while at the same time helping address residents’ energy and heating needs. And as Sysav, Renova and district-heating operators are owned by the cities they serve, they have an obligation to use waste. Not that it’s a heavy burden: The energy companies get the resource for free and sell the resulting heat and electricity. Measured by the volume of garbage used to produce energy, the United States — not surprisingly, given its much larger population — tops the list, with 29 million tons. Still, that’s just 12 percent of the waste generated by Americans.

This is how the waste-to-energy process works: After recyclable content has been removed, the garbage is placed in incinerators that produce heat or energy, which is then transported to nearby homes. From the ashes, small pieces of metal, which do not burn, are separated and recycled, while those of porcelain and tile are sifted to extract gravel, which is used in road construction. The remaining one percent goes into landfills. And though garbage-infused smoke sounds highly poisonous, thanks to electric filters that give the particles a negative electric charge, in Sweden the smoke is almost entirely nontoxic carbon dioxide and water, which are cleaned again before release. “I know that district heating means they burn garbage, but it’s not something I pay any attention to,” says Göteborg resident Karin Fjellander. “The thing about district heating is that it’s supposed to be green, so if the smoke was poisonous I don’t think they’d keep doing it.”

Because waste in landfills generates methane, a concentrated form of CO2, the Swedish municipal association estimates that every ton of imported garbage — which would otherwise have been decomposing in landfills — saves 1,100 pounds of CO2 equivalent. Even if ships were to travel specifically to deliver this garbage, the trade would still end up a net positive for the environment.

“You wouldn’t believe how many emails we get every week from people offering us garbage,” says Weine Wiqvist, CEO of Avfall Sverige.

For now, Sweden imports its trash mostly from Britain and Norway. According to Löwhagen, “But since our trading partners pay us to dispose of their garbage, we prefer to say that we’re exporting a service” — waste disposal. Either way, Sweden’s garbage needs are skyrocketing: According to Avfall Sverige, the country will import 1.5 million tons of waste this year and 2.3 million tons in 2020. But with recycling rates increasing, the European Union has advised its member states to start building district-heating facilities that can also produce energy. Delegations from various countries including Poland, India and China now regularly visit Sweden to learn about garbage heat and energy.

Waste being unloaded in Göteborg for transport to the Renova plant.
Courtesy Lars Ardarve via Renova
Austrians and Germans already recycle more than 60 percent of their garbage, while other Western European countries are not far behind. Meanwhile, the EU has commanded every member state to reach 50 percent by 2020. In the United States, 34 percent of trash is now recycled, up from 10 percent in 2000, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. “From a climate perspective, it’s better to burn garbage for heat and energy than putting it in landfill,” notes Dzebo. “But if everyone begins to use garbage for energy, there won’t be enough of it.”

A most unusual dilemma, then, compounded by the fact that garbage is so voluminous and prone to smelliness that transporting it from the other side of the globe would be expensive and impractical. “The Netherlands imports some from Italy, but in contrast to oil and gas, it’s not a good you can ship around the globe,” says Wiqvist. Still, Löwhagen and his colleagues hope that Sweden’s pioneer status will help it keep ahead of the pack. Developing countries, for their part, may get access to funding from the United Nations-affiliated Green Climate Fund should they decide to invest in waste-to-energy plants. “The Green Climate Fund is currently developing its investment framework, and one of the issues the members are discussing is whether waste-to-energy should receive climate funding as a renewable energy source,” explains Dzebo. “But it’s important that this model goes hand in hand with efficient sorting of the garbage, including the removal of recyclable and toxic material.” Developing countries will, in other words, have to show the Green Climate Fund that they don’t just plan to burn their waste wholesale but are also making serious efforts to reduce it.

Winqvist says he is not concerned about consumers’ increasingly diligent recycling, even though it reduces the volume of waste available for energy production. “After a couple of recycling rounds, paper can’t be reused again, so you have to burn it,” he explains. “And putting garbage in landfill will always be cheaper than burning it. Even with people recycling more, there’s going to be plenty of waste for heating and energy plants.”

 

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1. News
2. People

Bill Gates announces $1bn investment fund for clean energy technology
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/p...mate-change-a7469201.html?cmpid=facebook-post

Team-up with Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and others aims to fight climate change - and reap 'super' rewards

• Jon Sharman
• 10 hours ago

Click to follow
The Independent Online

Bill Gates and colleagues will splash the cash on green technology AFP
Bill Gates is heading up a fund worth more than $1bn to fight climate change by investing in new ways of producing clean energy.

The Microsoft co-founder will lead a group of investors whose combined wealth totals some $170bn, including Richard Branson, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba

Mr Gates says the fund, called Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), could pump money into "anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy", QZ.com reported.

READ MORE

• How Sweden is running out of things to recycle
• 'Witch hunt' fear as Trump seeks names of Government climate experts
• Jeremy Corbyn considering radical plan to ban petrol car sales

Investing in energy is a complex business, he told the site, and so the market is not crowded. He said: "People think you can just put $50m in and wait two years and then you know what you got. In this energy space, that’s not true at all.

"It’s such a big market that the value if you’re really providing a big portion of the world’s energy, the value of that will be super, super big."

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study in July estimated that between 2006 and 2011 clean energy investors lost more than half the £25bn they put into the sector.

10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change 11show all
BEV aims to invest in bringing greenhouse gas-reducing technology to market, including in transport, industrial processes and agriculture.

It is likely to look first at ways of storing energy. Creating more efficient means of storing power could allow more people to use energy sources, like wind turbines and solar panels, that only function intermittently because they are dependent on the weather.

US President-elect Donald Trump recently appointed climate-change sceptic Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Mr Gates said: "The dialogue with the new administration as it comes in about how they see energy research will be important.

"The general idea that research is a good deal fortunately is not a partisan thing."


Last summer Mr Gates said governments should invest in research into renewable energy on the same scale as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon missions.

He also announced he was planning to increase his personal investments in carbon capture technologies, next-generation nuclear, new kinds of batteries and other types of research in the field.

Commenting on the launch, the Secretary of State for Climate Change and Industry Nick Hurd said: "The transition to a clean energy system is well underway in the UK and around the world. This welcome announcement gives that process even more momentum. It is a great opportunity for British innovators in the UK low carbon sector, which is already worth over £80bn in turnover. Again we see how reducing emissions goes hand in hand with commercial opportunity."

• More about:
• Bill Gates
• climate change

 

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Climate Change in Bangladesh (2016 Documentary)

 

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(HD) Earth Under Water in Next 20 Years - Full Documentary

 

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A transformation is happening in global energy markets that’s worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity.

This has happened in isolated projects in the past: an especially competitive auction in the Middle East, for example, resulting in record-cheap solar costs. But now unsubsidized solar is beginning to outcompete coal and natural gas on a larger scale, and notably, new solar projects in emerging markets are costing less to build than wind projects, according to fresh data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The chart below shows the average cost of new wind and solar from 58 emerging-market economies, including China, India, and Brazil. While solar was bound to fall below wind eventually, given its steeper price declines, few predicted it would happen this soon. 1

Disclosed capex for onshore wind and PV projects in 58 non-OECD countries
Source: Bloomberg New Energy Finance
“Solar investment has gone from nothing—literally nothing—like five years ago to quite a lot,” said Ethan Zindler, head of U.S. policy analysis at BNEF. “A huge part of this story is China, which has been rapidly deploying solar” and helping other countries finance their own projects.

Half the Price of Coal
This year has seen a remarkable run for solar power. Auctions, where private companies compete for massive contracts to provide electricity, established record after record for cheap solar power. It started with a contract in January to produce electricity for $64 per megawatt-hour in India; then a deal in August pegging $29.10 per megawatt hour in Chile. That’s record-cheap electricity—roughly half the price of competing coal power.

“Renewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting” fossil fuel prices, BNEF chairman Michael Liebreich said in a note to clients this week.

Those are new contracts, but plenty of projects are reaching completion this year, too. When all the 2016 completions are tallied in coming months, it’s likely that the total amount of solar photovoltaics added globally will exceed that of wind for the first time. The latest BNEF projections call for 70 gigawatts of newly installed solar in 2016 compared with 59 gigawatts of wind.

The overall shift to clean energy can be more expensive in wealthier nations, where electricity demand is flat or falling and new solar must compete with existing billion-dollar coal and gas plants. But in countries that are adding new electricity capacity as quickly as possible, “renewable energy will beat any other technology in most of the world without subsidies,” said Liebreich.

Turning Points
The world recently passed a turning point and is adding more capacity for clean energy each year than for coal and natural gas combined. Peak fossil-fuel use for electricity may be reached within the next decade.

Thursday’s BNEF report, called Climatescope, ranks and profiles emerging markets for their ability to attract capital for low-carbon energy projects. The top-scoring markets were China, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, and India.

When it comes to renewable energy investment, emerging markets have taken the lead over the 35 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), spending $154.1 billion in 2015 compared with $153.7 billion by those wealthier countries, BNEF said. The growth rates of clean-energy deployment are higher in these emerging-market states, so they are likely to remain the clean energy leaders indefinitely, especially now that three-quarters have established clean-energy targets.

Still, the buildup of wind and solar takes time, and fossil fuels remain the cheapest option for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Coal and natural gas will continue to play a key role in the alleviation of energy poverty for millions of people in the years to come.

But for populations still relying on expensive kerosene generators, or who have no electricity at all, and for those living in the dangerous smog of thickly populated cities, the shift to renewables and increasingly to solar can’t come soon enough.
Source
@saiyan0321 @The Eagle @PaklovesTurkiye


Source: https://defence.pk/threads/world-en...thats-cheaper-than-wind.467211/#ixzz4T5e3yknA

 

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http://www.climatechangenews.com/20...cheaper-than-coal-says-india-energy-minister/

Solar is now cheaper than coal, says India energy minister
Published on 18/04/2016, 3:51pm24

Energy minister says power realities are changing fast, predicting a fast uptake in solar energy despite concerns over baseload and storage

(pic; http://www.qasolar.com/)

By Ed King

India is on track to soar past a goal to deploy more than 100 gigawatts of solar power by 20227, the country’s energy minister Piyush Goyal said on Monday.

Speaking at the release of a 15-point action plan for the country’s renewable sector, Goyal said he was now considering looking at “something more” for the fast growing solar sector.

“I think a new coal plant would give you costlier power than a solar plant,” he said.9

“Of course there are challenges of 24/7 power. We accept all of that – but we have been able to come up with a solar-based long term vision that is not subsidy based.”

In the past financial year, nearly 20GW of solar capacity has been approved by the government, with a further 14GW planned through 2016 according to the Union Budget.

UN: China, India driving new clean energy investments

Capital costs have fallen 60% in the past four years and could drop a further 40% reports Deutsche Bank, which said in a report last year solar investment would overtake coal by 2020.

Solar energy prices hit a new record low in January with the auction of 420 megawatts in Rajasthan at 4.34 rupees a kilowatt-hour. In comparison coal tariffs range between 3-5 rupees/kWh.

The looming bankruptcy of renewables giant Sun Edison has left many Indian investors nervous about backing solar, Bloomberg reported last week, but Goyal said the sector had a strong outlook.

“If one airline goes bankrupt I don’t think people stop flying in aircraft,” he joked, insisting India had renewable energy benchmarks that are “unparalleled in the world”.

Analysis: Will doubling coal tax boost India’s clean energy sector?

Goyal added India was now willing to help developing countries in Asia, Africa and the Pacific to develop clean energy plans free of charge.

The Delhi government would “supply expertise” to any poor country that needed help, promising it would “never charge a single rupee”.

“I sincerely believe that what the West is doing in this respect is anti-development and anti the fight against climate change,” he said, accusing rich countries of charging too much for clean technology.

The World Trade Organisation recently incurred the anger of the Modi government when it ruled India was illegally supporting domestic over international solar producers.

Poorer nations were receiving “absolutely no support” from developed governments, said Goyal, calling for the easing of trade agreements to allow countries to accelerate green energy deployment.

Report: India affirms commitment to sign Paris climate accord

“India should stop following the world and now is destined to lead the world as champion for underdeveloped, clean tech and clean energy,”3 he said.

Levels of climate finance support are an open sore between rich and poor countries, with progress towards a 2009 pledge to deliver $100 billion a year by 2020 still uncertain.

A report from the OECD club of industrialised nations released last year said $62 billion was flowing to poorer nations to help develop them green their economies – a number many contest.

Goyal said he hoped to win more support for an Indian-led global solar alliance when he travels to New York this week to witness the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“I believe this is the single most important world agreement that is going to be executed on 22 April,” he said.

Related posts:

1. No renewables without coal, says Indian energy minister
2. India targets 500% increase in solar power generation
3. Solar industry strong despite Sun Edison bankruptcy, say analysts
4. India’s energy revolution accelerates, as solar costs near coal

World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs
Plight of Kenya's indigenous Sengwer shows carbon offsets are empowering corporate recolonisation of the South

UN's REDD scheme promises carbon offsetting will empower local communities in the developing world while conserving forests - but critics say the scheme is fuelling genocidal evictions of indigenous people from their lands. Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP
Nafeez Ahmed
https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-redd-genocide-land-carbon-grab-sengwer-kenya

Thursday 3 July 2014 07.00 BST First published on Thursday 3 July 2014 07.00 BST

Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 500 million acres of land in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean was acquired or negotiated under deals brokered on behalf of foreign governments or transnational corporations.

Many such deals are geared toward growing crops or biofuels for export to richer, developed countries – with the consequence that small-holder farmers are displaced from their land and lose their livelihood while local communities go hungry.

The concentration of ownership of the world's farmland in the hands of powerful investors and corporations is rapidly accelerating, driven by resource scarcity and, thus, rising prices. According to a new report by the US land rights organisation Grain: "The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the production of commodities for industrial processing."

Less known factors, however, include 'conservation' and 'carbon offsetting.'

In west Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported, over a thousand homes had been torched by the government's Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.

Since 2007, successive Kenyan governments have threatened Sengwer communities in the Embobut forest with eviction. A deadline for residents to leave the forest expired in early January, prompting the most recent spate of violence. The pretext for the eviction is that the indigenous Sengwer – labelled wrongly as 'squatters' – are responsible for the accelerating degradation of the forest.

Elsewhere in Kenya's Mount Elgon forest, however, the KFS' track record reveals a more complicated story. In 2010, the indigenous Ogiek were issued a deadline to relocate in the name of forest conservation and reforestation. In February this year, Survival International reported that, like the Sengwer, the Ogiek continued to be violently evicted from their homes in violation of court orders, with reports of government officials and their supporters seizing their land.

While deforestation is undoubtedly linked to the activities of poor communities, the Kenyan government's approach illustrates favouritism toward parochial vested interests. In addition to the indigenous communities, the forests are also inhabited by many thousands of tea-planters, loggers, and squatters.

According to an internal report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2000, reviewing the Kenyan government's internationally-funded conservation programme, "the forests of Mt Elgon are not being sustainably managed." The report highlighted "unsustainable harvesting of both indigenous and plantation forest on Mt Elgon," routine flouting of "regulations and procedures for sound management", "the rate of forest plantation harvesting" far exceeding "the rate of replanting", lack of supervision of controls on "forest harvesting operations authorised by the Forest Department," and consequently "extensive loss of forest resources."

The IUCN review also alluded to the role of the Kenyan government's relationship with RaiPly Ltd, a Kenyan company involved in manufacture of wood products: "It is not known why or how RaiPly presumably received a license to harvest indigenous species, thus circumventing the ban on harvesting in indigenous forests."

Official Kenyan parliamentary records from May 1999 show that Kenyan political representatives have been concerned about these issues for some time. One question put to Kenya's then assistant minister for natural resources, Peter Lengees, by a Kenyan MP pointed out that "trees are being cut in Mt. Elgon forest," threatening the region's rivers "from both sides." Local government officials, the MP accused, "have shared up the area between these two rivers" which are now "drying up."

Lengees denied any knowledge of this, prompting a further question from late politician George Kapten, who said that "lorries from Raiply" had been ferrying high-value teak timber from Mount Elgon forest. "And I wish to add that the highest authority in this country has shares in RaiPly", he added. Lengees repeated his denial but admitted that RaiPly was "licensed to cut trees from some forests in Kenya."

Currently, RaiPly is among several major companies that are exempt from a partial government ban on logging. Effectively, the government is permitting powerful logging companies to accelerate deforestation to buoy the Kenyan economy while systematically persecuting indigenous communities whose environmental impact is comparatively negligible.

The devastating plight of Kenya's indigenous peoples is symptomatic of the flawed approach to conservation on the part of international agencies.

The World Bank's Natural Resource Management Programme (NRMP) with the Kenyan government, launched in 2007, has involved funding for projects in the Cherangany Hills under the UN's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) programme, including "financing REDD+ readiness activities" some of which began in May 2013.

Under the REDD scheme companies in the developed world purchase carbon credits to invest in reducing emissions from forested lands. Those credits turn up on the companies' balance sheets as carbon reductions. In practice, however, REDD schemes largely allow those companies to accelerate pollution while purchasing land and resources in the developing world at bargain prices.

A FPP background brief on the role of the World Bank claims that the implementation of NRMP – overseen by the very same KFS forces conducting a scorched earth campaign in Cherangany – violates the Bank's own operational safeguard policies. A formal Sengwer complaint to the Bank lodged in January last year alleged that human rights abuses by Kenyan forces were "a direct result" of the World Bank-funded programme:

"One example of the harm caused by the project was that it changed the border of the Cherangany forest reserves," according to the FPP brief, "such that Sengwer families, without any consultation or notice, found themselves on the inside of the forest reserve and therefore automatically subject to eviction by the KFS, evictions effectively funded by the World Bank. These evictions were customarily executed by burning homes and food stores in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013."

In a statement in February, the World Bank disavowed any link between its programme and the forced evictions, but also offered to the Kenyan government:

"... to share best practices in resettlement in line with its safeguard policies. These seek to improve or restore the living standards of people affected by involuntary resettlement."

A letter to the Bank in March by No REDD in Africa network (Nran) – a group of African civil society organisations - signed by over 60 international NGOs accused the Bank with the above words of "both admitting its complicity in the forced relocation of the Sengwer People as well as offering to collude with the Kenyan government to cover-up cultural genocide."

As "carbon credit financier and broker", the World Bank is "aiding and abetting the forced relocation of an entire Indigenous People through its Natural Resource Management Plan (NRMP) which includes REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), in the Cherangany Hills", said the letter.

The Sengwer's complaint is currently under investigation by the World Bank Inspection Panel. Although the report is now complete, a Bank spokesperson, Phil Hay, said that it would not be reviewed by the Board until August or September.

"The World Bank is not associated with the evictions and has not supported or financed resettlement in forest areas under the now closed Natural Resource Management Project (NMRP)", said Hay. "Nonetheless we are not bystanders either. We have been concerned about how the evictions have been handled and have been in frequent touch with the Kenyan government."

Notably, the Bank's professed concern here is with "how the evictions have been handled", not with evictions being carried out in the first place.

A damning new report from the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) based in Washington DC thus warns that the UN and World Bank approach to REDD is paving the way for large-scale "carbon grabs" by foreign governments and investors, putting at risk the land rights, livelihoods and lives of indigenous communities.

The report surveyed 23 low and middle income countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, covering 66 percent of the developing world's forests, concluding that REDD had not established laws or mechanisms by which indigenous peoples and local communities could profit from the carbon in the forests they inhabited.

"Their rights to their forests may be few and far between, but their rights to the carbon in the forests are non-existent", said Arvind Khare, RRI executive director.

At the United Nations climate negotiations in Warsaw in November 2013, delegates reached an agreement that would allow REDD to move forward which, however, excluded questions around who should control and benefit from the new carbon value found in standing forests.

Instead, the World Bank Carbon Fund's approach to defining carbon rights has been widely criticised by civil society groups for creating conflict between new property rights to carbon, and existing statutory and customarily held rights of local communities. The lack of clear safeguards and measures opens up an unprecedented opportunity for corporate and government land grabbing.

Tony La Viña, Dean of the Ateneo School of Government and chair of the intergovernmental REDD negotiations at the climate conferences in Copenhagen and Durban, said: "The carbon markets, when up and running, need to support the forest stewardship of the people who live there, and not provide national governments with yet another tool to dispossess their citizens from the natural resources they have cared for and depended on for generations."

According to the No REDD in Africa network, it is precisely because indigenous people and their rights are not factored into REDD principles that their implementation could lead to outright genocide.

Chris Lang, a British forestry expert who runs the REDD Monitor blog, agrees that under REDD schemes involving forested or agricultural land, "the rights to the use of that land could be taken away from indigenous peoples who depend on their forests for their livelihoods. Destroying livelihoods on this scale could conform to the parts (a), (b), and (c) of the [UN Convention] definition of genocide."

This article was inspired by a blogpost by British film-maker Dean Puckett who will be traveling to Kenya in August to investigate the plight of the Sengwer.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT. ZERO POINT is set in a near future following a Fourth Iraq War. Follow Ahmed on Facebook and Twitter.

 

[Banglar Bir]

World's largest solar park to light up Pakistan's future
ZOFEEN T. EBRAHIM — UPDATED Sep 08, 2015 08:14pm
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Entrance to Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power Park - Photo courtesy Zofeen T. Ebrahim.
Some 400,000 solar panels, spread over 200 hectares of flat desert, glare defiantly at the sun at what is known as the Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power Park (QASP) in Cholistan Desert, Punjab, named after Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

The 100MW photovoltaic cells (PV) solar farm was built by Chinese company Xinjiang SunOasis in just three months, and started selling electricity to the national grid in August.

This is the first energy project under the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key part of China’s ‘new silk road’, linking the port at Gwadar in southern Pakistan with Kashgar in China’s western region of Xinjiang.

The 100MW plant is the pilot stage of a more ambitious plan to build the world’s largest solar farm. Once completed in 2017, the site could have capacity of 5.2 million PV cells producing as much as 1,000MW of electricity – enough to power about 320,000 households. Construction of the next stage is already underway, led by another Chinese company Zonergy.

One of the main access roads inside QASP - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
Eighteen months ago, the site was nothing more than wilderness. Now a mini city has emerged in the middle of the desert, with over 2,000 workers accompanied by heavy machinery, power transmission lines, blocks of buildings, water pipes and pylons.

Reducing emissions, providing livelihoods
The Cholistan desert is an ideal spot for solar power, said Muhammad Hassan Askari, operating manager of the solar park. The area gets 13 hours of sunlight every day while the huge expanse of flat desert is ideal for a large commercial project like this one.

The big advantage of solar power, he said, is that a large park can be completed faster than thermal or hydropower projects, which take much longer and require a lot of maintenance.

The solar park will also shrink Pakistan’s carbon footprint, said Najam Ahmed Shah, the chief executive officer of QASP, displacing about 57,500 tonnes of coal burn and reducing emissions by 90,750 tonnes every year.

An aerial view of QASP. - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
Pakistan aims to reduce its reliance on hydrocarbons, especially imported coal, oil and gas, to around 60 per cent by 2025 from the present 87pc. The country has a target to produce 10pc of its total energy mix from renewable sources (excluding hydro-power, which already constitutes 15pc of the total energy mix). The current generation from renewable energy is around 1-2pc.

While Pakistan contributes less than 1pc to global Green House Gas (GHG) output, the country’s carbon emissions are growing by 3.9pc a year. By 2020 it will spew out 650 million tonnes of Co2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) if the current trend continues, said climatologist Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, the UN secretary general’s special advisor for Asia with the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

The solar park will also eventually generate 15,000 to 33,000 jobs for locals and attract investment to the region.

Unprecedented scale
Some experts worry the project is too ambitious. Former director general of WWF-Pakistan Ali Hassan Habib, who now runs a company providing rooftop solar solutions, welcomed the project but was uneasy about the government “jumping into untested scale”. The plant will be double the size of the existing largest solar PV generating facilities worldwide, he said.

“It may have been better to build the equivalent remaining 900MW closer to where electricity is consumed — on say the rooftops of large parking lots — rather than installing it in remote locations,” he said.

Environmental impact of clean energy
Because solar energy is still finding a foothold in the energy mix and technologies are evolving, not enough is known about the park’s impact on the environment and natural resources.

An aerial view of QASP. - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
Some negative impacts have already become apparent. For example, solar power consumes lots of water. PV panels may require little maintenance, according to QASP, but they need to be kept squeaky clean. An estimated one litre of water is used to clean each panel. Water consumed to clean the eventual 5.2 million panels built will be colossal for a country that is fast becoming water stressed. Currently, 30 people take 10 to 15 days to clean the 400,000 cells.

“This year we’ve been very lucky as there have been unprecedented rains and so panels were cleaned automatically,” said Askari, who said they were looking for more efficient ways to clean panels.

At the same time, increasing human activity will disturb the arid region’s rich biodiversity and wildlife, such as the Indian gazelle, caracal cat and houbara bustard.

The construction of a new road network and supporting commercial activities associated with large solar PV projects do leave a substantial “footprint” on the land, agreed Habib.

Shah justified the project, saying it was built on “uninhabited” “waste” land. “An Initial Environmental Examination was carried out and we got a nod from the Environment Protection Department before embarking upon the project,” he explained.

To offset any negative impact, Habib suggested the government set up an “environment and social fund”.

Environmentalists are also concerned about the fate of the millions of PV panels which will wear out within 25 years. The panels will have to be recycled to extract the silicon used to make them, and then replaced.

Pakistan’s energy crisis
Pakistan has been in the grip of severe energy shortages for many years with some rural areas left without power for up to 20 hours a day. There has been little local or foreign investment in the industrial sector because of the extensive power cuts, and a number of factories have had to close down.

An aerial view of QASP. - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
With an installed electricity generation capacity of 22,797MW, the country’s total production stands at just 14,000MW. In recent years, demand has risen to 19,000MW.

While the 1,000MW of solar energy will help ease energy constraints, Askari said government investment in several other hydropower and coal projects should also help alleviate power shortages.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif promised power cuts would end by 2018 at the inauguration ceremony of 100MW solar project in May, earlier this year.

Not everyone is happy
But some critics say it is the investors who will get rich from the solar project, while consumers will have to pay more in the long run.

“Hydropower can produce energy for less than half the price of solar and about the same as wind so why a fixation on solar?” said an Islamabad-based energy expert working with the government, who spoke to thethirdpole.net on the condition of anonymity.

He is sceptical of solar for a number of reasons.

First, the solar farm will actually produce far less than the much touted 1,000MW of electricity. “On average, solar power plants deliver only about 20pc of installed capacity, and the peak production is during the day, while the peak demand is in the evening when the plant does not produce anything,” the expert pointed out.

Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power Park - Photo courtesy Zofeen T. Ebrahim.
Alternative arrangements have to be made to draw upon hydro or thermal sources at an “extra cost”. But the project’s owners say the 100MW solar plant could produce near to capacity at 85MW at its peak.

Second, solar energy is more expensive than other energy sources. QASP claims it is selling solar power to the grid at $0.14 per unit. Sources within the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) say they have signed a deal to buy electricity at $0.24 per unit, which will drop later to perhaps $0.17 per unit after a period of seven years when loans are paid off. In either case, this price is far higher than the $0.07 for hydropower, $0.11 for fuel oil and $0.12 for imported LNG.

“And these figures are only for generation; another 25pc must be added to it for cost of delivery to be borne by the consumer, accounting for losses and theft,” he pointed out.

“The financial justification for solar was approved when oil prices were at $110 a barrel,” he said, lamenting that the government refused to heed to advice that oil prices would drop.

Others argue that solar prices will fall over time, making it competitive. Vaqar Ahmed, deputy executive director at the Islamabad-based think tank, Sustainable Development Policy Institute, said: “For every new technology the fixed costs are higher in the initial years and diminish over time as economies of scale are achieved.” And learning from China, efficiency will rise and prices for solar cells will continue to fall, he said.

Wind could be a much bigger contributor to Pakistan’s energy need, said WWF’s Habib, given its potential of 120,000MW. “Unlike solar, wind energy maintains production at night,” he pointed out.

Political risks
With just a little over two years left in his term, the success of the solar project is important for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

“The project has huge political implications for the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (N),” said Lieutenant Colonel (Ret) M Hassan Malik, who is responsible for the security arrangements of the entire QASP area.

An aerial view of QASP. - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
”Through this project the government also wants to send out the message to the outside world that it has the capacity to undertake mega projects and will provide foolproof security to investors.”

Working in an area known as a hotbed of criminals and extremists, Malik’s job is challenging. “Not only is the park a national asset, we have foreign nationals working at the plant, so the sensitivity is two-fold,” he said.

There are 800 to 900 men guarding the site, where around 400 Chinese workers and over 2,000 labourers work at any given time.

Cultural shock
For Alexander Halbich, a German engineer who has been at the park for over a year, getting used to “gun-toting” security men following him around was most disconcerting aspect of his new job. “The food is good, the people are extremely hospitable and we do go out to the city once in a while tailed by armed guards, but there is little to do after dark,” he added.

“There isn’t much to do in the evenings,” agreed Muhammad Hasan Askari, who heads the technical team. Hailing from Lahore, he keeps himself busy with work and looks forward to going home at the weekends.

Foreign workers get to go home less often. “I go every three months for ten days or more,” said Zhang Ting, a young Chinese engineer. “I’m quite ready to go home by two months but when I do go back, I miss Pakistan and the work,” she added.

Ting had to deal with a language barrier and hostile weather when she arrived to work at the site. The Chinese engineer also had to adjust to a “whole new work culture”.

“We resolved the issue by getting more Pakistanis on our design team to crease out the differences and conflicts,” she said.

View of the infrastructure developed alognside the solar park to connect it to the national grid. -Photo courtesy Zofeen T. Ebrahim.
This article was originally published on The Third Pole and has been reproduced with permission.

This is one single renewable energy project i pointed out of dozen.


@Muhammad Omar

Source: https://defence.pk/threads/world-en...cheaper-than-wind.467211/page-2#ixzz4TBKafOyw

 

[Muhammad Omar]

World's largest solar park to light up Pakistan's future
ZOFEEN T. EBRAHIM — UPDATED Sep 08, 2015 08:14pm
WHATSAPP
243 COMMENTS
PRINT

Entrance to Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power Park - Photo courtesy Zofeen T. Ebrahim.
Some 400,000 solar panels, spread over 200 hectares of flat desert, glare defiantly at the sun at what is known as the Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power Park (QASP) in Cholistan Desert, Punjab, named after Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

The 100MW photovoltaic cells (PV) solar farm was built by Chinese company Xinjiang SunOasis in just three months, and started selling electricity to the national grid in August.

This is the first energy project under the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key part of China’s ‘new silk road’, linking the port at Gwadar in southern Pakistan with Kashgar in China’s western region of Xinjiang.

The 100MW plant is the pilot stage of a more ambitious plan to build the world’s largest solar farm. Once completed in 2017, the site could have capacity of 5.2 million PV cells producing as much as 1,000MW of electricity – enough to power about 320,000 households. Construction of the next stage is already underway, led by another Chinese company Zonergy.

One of the main access roads inside QASP - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
Eighteen months ago, the site was nothing more than wilderness. Now a mini city has emerged in the middle of the desert, with over 2,000 workers accompanied by heavy machinery, power transmission lines, blocks of buildings, water pipes and pylons.

Reducing emissions, providing livelihoods
The Cholistan desert is an ideal spot for solar power, said Muhammad Hassan Askari, operating manager of the solar park. The area gets 13 hours of sunlight every day while the huge expanse of flat desert is ideal for a large commercial project like this one.

The big advantage of solar power, he said, is that a large park can be completed faster than thermal or hydropower projects, which take much longer and require a lot of maintenance.

The solar park will also shrink Pakistan’s carbon footprint, said Najam Ahmed Shah, the chief executive officer of QASP, displacing about 57,500 tonnes of coal burn and reducing emissions by 90,750 tonnes every year.

An aerial view of QASP. - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
Pakistan aims to reduce its reliance on hydrocarbons, especially imported coal, oil and gas, to around 60 per cent by 2025 from the present 87pc. The country has a target to produce 10pc of its total energy mix from renewable sources (excluding hydro-power, which already constitutes 15pc of the total energy mix). The current generation from renewable energy is around 1-2pc.

While Pakistan contributes less than 1pc to global Green House Gas (GHG) output, the country’s carbon emissions are growing by 3.9pc a year. By 2020 it will spew out 650 million tonnes of Co2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) if the current trend continues, said climatologist Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, the UN secretary general’s special advisor for Asia with the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

The solar park will also eventually generate 15,000 to 33,000 jobs for locals and attract investment to the region.

Unprecedented scale
Some experts worry the project is too ambitious. Former director general of WWF-Pakistan Ali Hassan Habib, who now runs a company providing rooftop solar solutions, welcomed the project but was uneasy about the government “jumping into untested scale”. The plant will be double the size of the existing largest solar PV generating facilities worldwide, he said.

“It may have been better to build the equivalent remaining 900MW closer to where electricity is consumed — on say the rooftops of large parking lots — rather than installing it in remote locations,” he said.

Environmental impact of clean energy
Because solar energy is still finding a foothold in the energy mix and technologies are evolving, not enough is known about the park’s impact on the environment and natural resources.

An aerial view of QASP. - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
Some negative impacts have already become apparent. For example, solar power consumes lots of water. PV panels may require little maintenance, according to QASP, but they need to be kept squeaky clean. An estimated one litre of water is used to clean each panel. Water consumed to clean the eventual 5.2 million panels built will be colossal for a country that is fast becoming water stressed. Currently, 30 people take 10 to 15 days to clean the 400,000 cells.

“This year we’ve been very lucky as there have been unprecedented rains and so panels were cleaned automatically,” said Askari, who said they were looking for more efficient ways to clean panels.

At the same time, increasing human activity will disturb the arid region’s rich biodiversity and wildlife, such as the Indian gazelle, caracal cat and houbara bustard.

The construction of a new road network and supporting commercial activities associated with large solar PV projects do leave a substantial “footprint” on the land, agreed Habib.

Shah justified the project, saying it was built on “uninhabited” “waste” land. “An Initial Environmental Examination was carried out and we got a nod from the Environment Protection Department before embarking upon the project,” he explained.

To offset any negative impact, Habib suggested the government set up an “environment and social fund”.

Environmentalists are also concerned about the fate of the millions of PV panels which will wear out within 25 years. The panels will have to be recycled to extract the silicon used to make them, and then replaced.

Pakistan’s energy crisis
Pakistan has been in the grip of severe energy shortages for many years with some rural areas left without power for up to 20 hours a day. There has been little local or foreign investment in the industrial sector because of the extensive power cuts, and a number of factories have had to close down.

An aerial view of QASP. - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
With an installed electricity generation capacity of 22,797MW, the country’s total production stands at just 14,000MW. In recent years, demand has risen to 19,000MW.

While the 1,000MW of solar energy will help ease energy constraints, Askari said government investment in several other hydropower and coal projects should also help alleviate power shortages.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif promised power cuts would end by 2018 at the inauguration ceremony of 100MW solar project in May, earlier this year.

Not everyone is happy
But some critics say it is the investors who will get rich from the solar project, while consumers will have to pay more in the long run.

“Hydropower can produce energy for less than half the price of solar and about the same as wind so why a fixation on solar?” said an Islamabad-based energy expert working with the government, who spoke to thethirdpole.net on the condition of anonymity.

He is sceptical of solar for a number of reasons.

First, the solar farm will actually produce far less than the much touted 1,000MW of electricity. “On average, solar power plants deliver only about 20pc of installed capacity, and the peak production is during the day, while the peak demand is in the evening when the plant does not produce anything,” the expert pointed out.

Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power Park - Photo courtesy Zofeen T. Ebrahim.
Alternative arrangements have to be made to draw upon hydro or thermal sources at an “extra cost”. But the project’s owners say the 100MW solar plant could produce near to capacity at 85MW at its peak.

Second, solar energy is more expensive than other energy sources. QASP claims it is selling solar power to the grid at $0.14 per unit. Sources within the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) say they have signed a deal to buy electricity at $0.24 per unit, which will drop later to perhaps $0.17 per unit after a period of seven years when loans are paid off. In either case, this price is far higher than the $0.07 for hydropower, $0.11 for fuel oil and $0.12 for imported LNG.

“And these figures are only for generation; another 25pc must be added to it for cost of delivery to be borne by the consumer, accounting for losses and theft,” he pointed out.

“The financial justification for solar was approved when oil prices were at $110 a barrel,” he said, lamenting that the government refused to heed to advice that oil prices would drop.

Others argue that solar prices will fall over time, making it competitive. Vaqar Ahmed, deputy executive director at the Islamabad-based think tank, Sustainable Development Policy Institute, said: “For every new technology the fixed costs are higher in the initial years and diminish over time as economies of scale are achieved.” And learning from China, efficiency will rise and prices for solar cells will continue to fall, he said.

Wind could be a much bigger contributor to Pakistan’s energy need, said WWF’s Habib, given its potential of 120,000MW. “Unlike solar, wind energy maintains production at night,” he pointed out.

Political risks
With just a little over two years left in his term, the success of the solar project is important for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

“The project has huge political implications for the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (N),” said Lieutenant Colonel (Ret) M Hassan Malik, who is responsible for the security arrangements of the entire QASP area.

An aerial view of QASP. - Photo courtesy Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power (Pvt) Ltd.
”Through this project the government also wants to send out the message to the outside world that it has the capacity to undertake mega projects and will provide foolproof security to investors.”

Working in an area known as a hotbed of criminals and extremists, Malik’s job is challenging. “Not only is the park a national asset, we have foreign nationals working at the plant, so the sensitivity is two-fold,” he said.

There are 800 to 900 men guarding the site, where around 400 Chinese workers and over 2,000 labourers work at any given time.

Cultural shock
For Alexander Halbich, a German engineer who has been at the park for over a year, getting used to “gun-toting” security men following him around was most disconcerting aspect of his new job. “The food is good, the people are extremely hospitable and we do go out to the city once in a while tailed by armed guards, but there is little to do after dark,” he added.

“There isn’t much to do in the evenings,” agreed Muhammad Hasan Askari, who heads the technical team. Hailing from Lahore, he keeps himself busy with work and looks forward to going home at the weekends.

Foreign workers get to go home less often. “I go every three months for ten days or more,” said Zhang Ting, a young Chinese engineer. “I’m quite ready to go home by two months but when I do go back, I miss Pakistan and the work,” she added.

Ting had to deal with a language barrier and hostile weather when she arrived to work at the site. The Chinese engineer also had to adjust to a “whole new work culture”.

“We resolved the issue by getting more Pakistanis on our design team to crease out the differences and conflicts,” she said.

View of the infrastructure developed alognside the solar park to connect it to the national grid. -Photo courtesy Zofeen T. Ebrahim.
This article was originally published on The Third Pole and has been reproduced with permission.

This is one single renewable energy project i pointed out of dozen.


@Muhammad Omar

Source: https://defence.pk/threads/world-en...cheaper-than-wind.467211/page-2#ixzz4TBKafOyw

New Pictures of Quaid e Azam Solar Power Project 400 MW is now operational 600 MW under Construction

 

[Banglar Bir]

• 1000 MW Quaid-e-Azam Solar Park, Bahawalpur, Pakistan.. 400 MW is now Operational. 3 new Plants sites are visible in Satellite view. ... 600 MW is Under Construction
  
  
  
  
  
  

Source: https://defence.pk/threads/quaid-e-azam-solar-power-plant-updates.467398/#ixzz4TBLQEj7G

I JUST HOPE OUR BANGLADESHI WOULD KINDLY LEARN FROM OUR NEIGHBOURS BRILLIANT PLANING AND THEIR MATERIALIZATION.

 

[jamal18]

Half of Holland is below sea level.

Build dykes, pump the water out.

Or get a large chunk of Australia. There's loads of land there.

 

[Banglar Bir]

Half of Holland is below sea level.

Build dykes, pump the water out.

Or get a large chunk of Australia. There's loads of land there.

NOT POSSIBLE AS COASTAL INDIANS AND MALDIVES WILL BE THE FIRST OCCUPIERS

 

[Muhammad Omar]

• 1000 MW Quaid-e-Azam Solar Park, Bahawalpur, Pakistan.. 400 MW is now Operational. 3 new Plants sites are visible in Satellite view. ... 600 MW is Under Construction
  
  
  
  
  
  

Source: https://defence.pk/threads/quaid-e-azam-solar-power-plant-updates.467398/#ixzz4TBLQEj7G

I JUST HOPE OUR BANGLADESHI WOULD KINDLY LEARN FROM OUR NEIGHBOURS BRILLIANT PLANING AND THEIR MATERIALIZATION.

We are also making Wind Power Projects in Pakistan which will collectively produce 2000-3000 MW
1500 MW of Nuclear Power is completed 3300 MW will be completed in 2022
4000-4500 MW of Hydro Power is also under construction

Clean Energy

 

[Banglar Bir]

ECO FRIENDLY CLEAN AND GREEN RENEWABLE ENERGY.